Many Americans have heard of the infamous “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda, which has been introduced in several parliamentary sessions since it arose out of an anti-gay conference that Scott Lively headlined in 2009. But the day-to-day reality for LGBT Ugandans is already violence, death threats, severe discrimination and oppression. Meetings of LGBT activists are raided and shut down, and advocates have been arrested for exercising their rights to speech, assembly and association. LGBT Ugandans’ advocacy, indeed their existence, is already criminalized.

No one has done more to orchestrate this situation than Scott Lively. Since 2002, he has worked systematically to strip away human rights protections from LGBT people in Uganda and elsewhere around the world, to silence them and make it impossible for them to organize and defend their rights. While he peddles the usual, age-old lie that LGBT people are pedophiles in order to deliberately provoke the rage that feeds the growing repression and violence, he combines that myth with a new twist, that gays were also responsible for the Holocaust and that Hitler’s Germany is what can happen when a gay movement grows unchecked.

But this case isn’t simply about Lively’s “hate preach.” He long ago moved beyond “mere” hatemongering when he became a kind of persecution consultant, strategizing with influential leaders and cohorts in other countries about ways to further silence and remove LGBT people from basic protections of the law, in particular by criminalizing their advocacy. Persecution, defined as the “severe deprivation of fundamental rights” on the basis of identity, is a crime under international law; to be exact, it’s a “crime against humanity.”

So there you go, a really bad person, who is actively campaigning for the deaths of other human beings. However, Lively’s depravity also, unsurprisingly, is also reflected in his ‘reasons’ against gay rights.

Yesterday in an interview with Sandy Rios of the American Family Association [Lively] warned that homosexuality “is the issue of the End Times.” According to Lively, the advance of gay rights will lead to the persecution and killing of Christians like in the early days of the Church and is “another sign that I believe that we’re close to the end.”

How’s that false dilemma logic for you? The guy who is persecuting and trying to kill people of a different sexual orientation believes that if you treat gay persons like a human being and merely give them equal rights then they will try to kill you!

We need to remember that in the time leading up to the Flood what the rabbis teach about the last straw for God before He brought the Flood was when they started writing wedding songs to homosexual marriage and Jesus said that you’ll know the End Times because it will be like the days of Noah. There’s never been a time in the history of the world since before the Flood when homosexual marriage has been open and celebrated, and that’s another sign that I believe that we’re close to the end.

But what kind of appeal to authority is being made here? What is the basis for Lively’s argument? Is Lively who calls himself a “pastor” using the Bible to make his argument?

Nope.

The reference Lively is making here is not from the Bible, and Genesis 6-9, but from Genesis Rabbah, a midrash, an interpretation and expansion of Genesis from Jewish rabbis in the first to third century CE!

The Midrash (textual study, textual interpretation) was actually a formal doctrinal and homiletical exposition of the Hebrew Scriptures written in Hebrew and Aramaic. Midrashim (plural) were collected into a body of material between 100 B.C. and A.D. 300. Within the Midrash were two major parts: the Halakah (procedure), a further expansion of the Torah only, and the Haggada (declaration, explanation), being commentaries on the entire Old Testament. These Midrashim differed from the Targums in that the former were actually commentaries, whereas the latter were paraphrases. The Midrashim contain some of the earliest extant synagogue homilies on the Old Testament, including such things as proverbs and parables. – Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, Rev. and expanded., 502-03 (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986).

How does Rabbinic midrash from the third century CE suddenly have some sort of authority in the gay rights conversation? And how is their interpretation of a myth suddenly the basis for the End of the World?!?

Fear-monger much? Much too much.

Any bets that there are rabbinic interpretations in Genesis Rabbah that Lively wouldn’t agree with? Ah, but the beauty of special pleading means that I found this one small part that agrees with my intolerant bias, therefore, I can use it to make a ‘point’.

So what does Genesis Rabbah say?

R. Huna said in R. Joseph’s name: the generation of the Flood were not blotted out from the world until they composed nuptial song*in honour of pederasty and bestiality. Bereshith Rabbah XXVI. 5

Well, that seems like a pretty airtight argument! Rabbis in the third century said gay wedding songs caused the Flood: down with gay rights or we’re all going to die!!!

Exaggerate, fear monger, and hate much? Much too much.

Well if the world is going to end I might as well do my part:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
The world will not end
If gay people say I do

* Another possible translation here: until they wrote marriage deeds for males and beasts.